


Four Times Qrow Asked For Death, And One Time He Refused

by vividder



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Angst, Character Study, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Hallucinations, Medical Inaccuracies, Pneumonia, Poisoning, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Torture, Visions in dreams, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 23:18:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17130596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vividder/pseuds/vividder
Summary: Qrow finds himself at Death's door five times, and each time he fights the outcome.Please heed the tags.  This fic is not lighthearted and you have been warned.





	1. Childhood Illness

**Author's Note:**

> Again, another warning to read the tags. I'm really not out to ruin your day. 
> 
> On the other hand, if you do read and enjoy this fic, please let me know by leaving kudos and/or constructive criticism!

What started as a cough had slowly morphed into something else.

As an adult, Qrow can’t really remember how--in memory, the event has become edited, almost like a film.  One day, he’s just coughing, a regular summer cold. One night, he wakes himself up coughing so hard that he can’t breathe, can’t catch his breath, and Raven runs out of their tent to get one of the elders, one of the adults.  Someone who will know what to do.

As his fever spiked, Qrow’s memories became even patchier.  He remembers pain, pain everywhere, and heat radiating across his entire body.  Nothing is comfortable and yet he doesn’t have the energy to move--and when the adults move him to sit up and drink, to switch his blankets for fresh ones, everything just becomes worse and more painful.

For days, his world is consumed by the hot chills of fever, of painful coughing and not being able to draw breath, of not being able to move, of not being able to sleep.  Qrow’s fever dreams begin to mingle with reality, so that everything around him doesn’t quite feel real, and he doesn’t care. He just wants it to stop.

Years later, he’ll still remember one dream as if he’d just had it the previous night. It will unnerve him in ways he won’t understand, always creeping into the edges of his consciousness when he feels bleak and has had too much to drink.  

A man, standing at the edge of the camp.  He is far enough within the shadows that Qrow can’t make out any details of his figure, or of his clothes.  

Yet he swears he sees the man shake his head before turning back and vanishing into the trees.

The next morning, a conference is held.  The traditional poultices have failed and Qrow’s illness is serious enough that the high elders have sent some men to trade for modern medicine.  

With the new medicines, Qrow slowly gets better.  The weights slowly lift from his chest and the heat seeps out of his bones.

Sometimes, Qrow wishes he’d died then, just so that he wouldn’t have to have dealt with the pain of his future.


	2. Suicide Attempt

Qrow chooses this spot simply because no one would think to look for him here.  He’d found the abandoned barn on a hike one morning, set far off the trail and completely untouched until he’d come along.

The chain on the lock had decayed enough that Qrow could break it with his bare hands, so he does and eases the door open.  He sets Harbinger next to one wall and pats his pocket, feeling for the note he’d left there.

Then he grabs the rope, transforms into a crow, and flies up to the rafters before transforming back.  

Qrow ties it around one of the beams supporting the roof, just barely reachable from the unsteady platform on which he stands.  The other end has already been tied into a noose, which he slips his head into and tightens behind his neck. 

Qrow drains his flask and throws it to the side.  This was for Summer, for Raven, for the fact Tai’s daughters had no mothers and a drunk for an uncle.  This was for Team STRQ’s dissolution and failure, for his own inability to be the man they needed him to be and for letting them down time and time again, ultimately destroying their lives.

He steps over the edge of the platform, and the incredible pressure immediately crushes his neck, constricting his windpipe, setting his chest on fire, and narrowing his vision.  His body jerks like a puppet’s as he fights the urge to grab at the noose, to struggle to pull it off his own neck.

He can feel himself becoming weak without oxygen.  It doesn’t take very long.

As he stops struggling, something snaps.  Qrow feels himself falling, his body hanging in the air for a split second before it slams into the packed earth below.  

His chest heaves as his lungs struggle to pull in enough air through his bruised windpipe, and he coughs as his body fights to expel the carbon dioxide that has built up in his blood.  Qrow hadn’t been prepared to land and had fallen awkwardly, twisting an ankle, but the pain is miniscule compared to the agony of trying to recover his breath.

Finally, Qrow stops heaving and gasping and coughing and stares up at the night sky through the holes in the barn’s roof.  Something within him feels so broken, but he can’t pinpoint exactly what. He doesn’t know what to do. He just wanted the endless train of suffering that has been his life to stop, and now he’s even fucked that up.  He can’t do anything right, so he just stays there, sobbing, until he runs out of tears.

The beam had broken.  It wasn’t like he could try again.

So Qrow drags himself back to his feet and makes his way home, grabbing Harbinger on the way out and using it as a crutch.

He buys a new flask the next day.


	3. Withdrawal

After Yang’s reckless actions almost get her and Ruby killed, Qrow realizes that he has to shape up and be the kind of uncle these girls deserve, because they sure as hell don’t deserve him.

If he’d been any more out of it, he might not have realized what had happened.  

That morning could have so easily been the last time Taiyang saw his daughters, the girls Qrow loves as if they were his own.

So Qrow dumps his flask into the grass and gathers the bottles, throwing them like knives into the trees around his small ramshackle cabin.

Then he waits, anxiously, for  _ it  _ to start.  Because he’s talked to enough relapsed addicts to know  _ it _ won’t be easy.

But Qrow is sure as hell it’ll be worth it.

By the next morning, he’s as sick as he’s ever been.  So he lets Taiyang know he’s got the flu or something and not to send the girls over, he doesn’t want them to get sick too.  Of course, the real reason is that he doesn’t want them to see him like this, but he’s not going to say that outright.

As the next few days pass, everything becomes a blur.  Qrow gives up on trying to take care of himself to make this easier because he’s in too much pain and it’s all too difficult when his head is spinning.

Meanwhile, the black thoughts he drank to escape from keep coming closer and closer, assaulting him when he’s at his weakest with glee.

_ They don’t love you. _

_ You ruined everything. _

_ Summer’s death was your fault. _

_ You’re worthless. _

He wants to die, and this feels like it might just do him in.  He smiles--perhaps deliriously. It’s ironic that a Huntsman totally competent when drunk would die on his own bathroom floor totally sober, but that was Qrow’s life.  Just a series of failures and unexpected ironies.

Eventually, he’s not sure what’s reality or fiction.  His throat is on fire and the world spins even when he’s laying down.  Qrow doesn’t know if he’s even sleeping or awake, the nightmares have begun to blend with the hallucinations, creating an endless stream of the not-quite-real to haunt him.

Sometimes he thinks people are walking through the house, but he’s not sure.  One, he remembers, scoffs at him.

Qrow can’t think straight enough to yell at the strangers, to kick them out.  Even if he could find the words, it would have been a rasp anyways, his throat is so dry.

In any case, if someone does come in to rob his sad little place, Qrow would gratefully let them kill him right now.  

Finally, real footsteps walk through his house, but Qrow doesn’t realize it. Even seeing Taiyang doesn’t make him believe he’s real--he’s seen him before, but he’s screamed at Qrow for all he’s done.  And true to form, he’s angry at first: “What did you take?” he demands, immediately tearing apart the bathroom to find any evidence of whatever he assumes Qrow must have overdosed on.

He drags Qrow upright and Qrow almost falls right back over as his blood pressure tanks.

“What did you take?” he demands.

“I wish,” Qrow slurs back.  He thinks the idea of an overdose sounds pretty great right now.

Taiyang tries a different tack.  “Are you drunk?”

Qrow feels insulted by the question, considering he was trying to get sober.  Of course his hallucinations would say shit like that. “Hell no.”

Taiyang looks around and sighs.  Qrow knows he and the bathroom he camped out in are both messes.  “You’re sticking around,” he commented. This hallucination seemed oddly persistent.

“Of course I’m sticking around, because as far as I can tell, you’re sick and not all there in the head right now.”

“Cool,” was the only thing Qrow could say to that.

Taiyang wraps his arm around Qrow’s waist to lift him up.  His skin is clammy and freezing, and the moment he’s on his feet, he collapses.  Taiyang holds him up and maneuvers his body so that Qrow’s laying in the tub, his feet resting on the faucet.  He needs to think, but he can’t leave Qrow in a puddle of his own sick, so that’s getting cleaned up while the other man regains consciousness.

He’ll have to get Qrow home.  That’s the only way this can work.  He doesn’t want to leave Ruby and Yang on their own overnight--hell, he didn’t want to leave them for the hour it was supposed to take to make sure their uncle hadn’t killed himself somehow, considering what had happened a few days ago.

Qrow seems restless in his sleep, thrashing about and gasping until his hand hits the ceramic lip of the tub, waking him up.  “Ow.”

“I really hope that you will pay me back somehow for cleaning your bathroom,” Tai complains as he wipes down the sink.  “I know it’s a long shot, but it would be really fucking nice to get some thanks for cleaning up your messes all the damn time.”

“Wasn’t drunk this time.”

“No, you weren’t, in the most unexpected twist of all time.”  Tai turns around. “You need to get cleaned up.”

Qrow looks surprised at this, but it has nothing to do with what Taiyang had said.  “You’re real.”

“I am not leaving you by yourself,” Taiyang continues, not sure what to do with the previous statement, “but you’re not coming with me covered in your own vomit.  You need to get cleaned up and changed.”

“I’m losing my mind.”

Taiyang runs a hand through his hair.  “You aren’t really making sense, to be honest.”

“My head hurts.”

“We can get some medication at my house.”

Worryingly, Qrow actually cooperates when Taiyang tries to get him cleaned up, even nearly nodding off a few times.  

But a sudden change comes over him when Taiyang tries to wash his hair.  Qrow begins to thrash, lashing out. “You’re trying to drown me,” Qrow accuses.

“No, I’m not!  Now stay still!”

Although he’s as sick as a dog, Qrow is still strong and Taiyang just has to wait for him to stop thrashing in confusion to avoid either of them getting injured.  Eventually, though, Qrow settles. As Taiyang keeps trying to finish cleaning Qrow up, tears run down his cheeks. Taiyang has only seen Qrow cry a handful of times before.  Maybe just felt that unwell, maybe he was still paranoid. Either way, he let Taiyang finish up the bath and dress him.

“Why didn’t you hurt me?” Qrow mutters.

“Because in your own stupid way you tried to fix a problem, and despite being a huge asshole, Ruby and Yang think you’re the greatest uncle ever.  And believe it or not, I don’t actually want you to die.”

‘Good to know.”

Taiyang carries Qrow back through the woods to his house as night fell, feeling the man twitch and his heart beat too fast as he walks with Qrow on his back.  

When he reaches their house, rather than put Qrow down, he kicks the door with his foot and shouts.  “It’s your dad!”

Yang opens the door.  Her and Ruby’s toys litter the living room floor, but Taiyang (who normally cares about his daughters picking up after themselves) doesn’t mention anything, just brings Qrow back to their guest room and tucks him in.  He’s already asleep, and that’s probably for the best.

“What happened to Uncle Qrow?” Yang asks, standing in the doorway.  Ruby stands next to her, clutching a doll.

Taiyang doesn’t answer the question.  “He’s going to be okay now.”

And soon, he is.


	4. Torture

To Qrow, the idea that he’d be captured while on a mission was as inevitable as death and taxes.

He wasn’t a trained spy, but he was as close as Ozpin could get at times, and so he went and got sacrificed for the greater good.

Now it’s finally happened.  

Qrow finds himself tied to a metal chair, all of the legs weighted so that he can’t shift it, and left in the empty concrete cell.

Without windows (they’d all been taped up), Qrow can’t estimate how long he’s left to sit there.  He considers getting a nap. After all, he doubts they’d let him have one once the interrogation starts.

Finally, a man comes in.  He’s as thin as a rail, with dark hair and piercing eyes, dressed in a long white coat with a surgeon’s mask obscuring much of his face.  He pushes a covered cart and Qrow can’t help but notice that he wears thigh-high rain boots and elbow-length rubber gloves.

“Finally.  I thought you’d all just left.”

“I’m afraid you thought wrong, little crow,” the man says in a posh accent.  “What does Ozpin want with your former tribe?”

“I couldn’t say, Doc,” Qrow replies, an easy smile masking his own worry.  Through their conversation, the man has been working on his cart, which he then pushes over to Qrow’s chair before locking the wheels.

“That isn’t an option, sir.”  He hangs an IV bag from a hook on the cart before kneeling down and slicing through the leg of Qrow’s slacks with a knife.  He peels the fabric away like a surgeon peels back the skin at the site of an incision and jams the end of the catheter into Qrow’s calf.

Suddenly, Qrow feels his defensive aura collapse and a wave of exhaustion come over him.  

“Now, what does Ozpin want in Anima?”

Qrow smiles and lowers his voice, forcing the doctor to lean in.  “To fuck your mother in the ass with a Goliath’s tusk,” he says, a cocky smile crossing his face. 

The doctor stands, his mask moving as his expression changes beneath.  “If that’s what you have to say, so be it.”

He pulls out a knife and cuts through Qrow’s boots, shredding them as he tears them off.  Then he takes a vice in his hand. “Did Ozpin send any other informants?”

Qrow’s laugh turns to a scream as the bones in his toes crack and break under the pressure, one by one, for each question he refuses to answer.

Qrow has no idea how long they go through this routine, hours of being left alone and the doctor coming in to demand information and to torture him into giving it.  Eventually, masked men come in and hang him from chains attached to his wrists so that his body becomes easier to access. He remembers paralytic injections, the same Aura-depleting drug, shocks, his shoulders being forced from their sockets, burns, and beatings.  

Eventually, Qrow starts to wonder if Ozpin knows he’s gone, or even if the man cares.  The drugs they give Qrow distort time and make sleep impossible. Sometimes he thinks he sees figures in the shadows of the warehouse when no one’s there, mocking him all the while.  

After his kneecaps get broken for not knowing how to answer for some financial records they’d held up in front of him, Qrow howls and curses.  

Then, finally, someone enters and turned on the lights.  Qrow knows by now to keep his eyes closed, or else he’ll be momentarily blinded by the painful halogen lights.  But he doesn’t hear the familiar sound of rubber boots or the cart. Slowly, he opens his eyes. Winter Schnee places a remote detonator on the floor.

Qrow smiles through the pain. “Took you long enough.”

She uses her saber to cut Qrow down and he can’t help screaming as the blood returns to his arms.  As his pain consumes him, Qrow barely notices Winter tearing out the different IVs stabbed into his limbs.  

“We need to get out of here.”

“For once, I agree.”


	5. Poison

From the moment he’s stung by Tyrian, Qrow knows that the wound is worse than it looks.  He tells the children it’s just a scratch and wraps it up with the bandages from his own kit.  They have enough on their plates that they shouldn’t put their energy into worrying about something they can’t fix.  

His side aches and burns as he speaks with them that evening, prioritizing their preparedness for the journey ahead over his own well-being.  It was their bad luck he got stung after all, and now they have no protection. All they know is that they need to get to Mistral, but nothing beyond that.  Qrow wants to make sure that they don’t go in totally blind, that even if he doesn’t make it that far, that they might still have a hope of getting through this.

Throughout their conversation, he drinks from his flask enough to dull the pain a little bit--or at least, make it easier to ignore on his part.  

Finally, he can’t ignore the agony in his side any longer. Qrow tells the kids he’s taking a walk to clear his head, and makes sure he walks out of their sight before collapsing to the forest floor and curling in on his injured side.  He’s dizzy and sick--from the poison or the pain, he’s not sure. 

Ruby can’t see him like this, Qrow thinks as he convulses in the dirt.

After their campsite falls quiet, Qrow drags himself back there on his hands and knees.  Standing hurts too much. His whole body is on fire, pain radiating out from the scratch.

At their camp, the campfire embers flicker in the dark and all the kids have laid out their bedrolls in a circle around them, all sleeping soundly.

Qrow lays against a tree and falls in and out of consciousness, his body thrashing against his will.  It’s getting bad. He’s started coughing. 

Qrow doesn’t want the kids to see him like this, but they’ll have to.  They’re the only people who can get him help in the middle-of-nowhere, Anima, and to run from them now would almost certainly come across as some sort of betrayal, considering how he made a point of mentioning how he trusted them the previous night.

He watches the sun come over the horizon.  

Ren wakes first, mentioning that they should get moving, and everyone else stirs up as they hear their friends begin moving around.

Qrow feels another coughing fit coming on and he doesn’t have the energy to stop it.  He lifts a hand to his mouth to try and muffle it, but that doesn’t do a thing because Ruby still notices. 

 

When he comes to again, the kids have fashioned a makeshift litter out of a bedroll and some rope and tree branches and are carrying him on it.  Ruby walks at his side, holding his hand opposite the scratch, which Qrow is grateful for. The other half of his body wouldn’t tolerate even a light touch.

His back arches suddenly, all his muscles seizing at once, and Qrow bites his own tongue hard enough to draw blood to avoid screaming, though he can’t suppress a groan.

The convulsions continue for a few minutes.  The kids set him down and stare, and Qrow wishes he could crack a joke about what they’re staring at, but he can’t catch his breath long enough to pretend everything’s fine.

Finally, his body settles.  Qrow can tell they’re scared, tears run down Ruby’s cheeks and he’s not even sure she knows they’re there.  Nora’s hands are clasped over her mouth like she’s trying to hide, but failing. Her eyes betray her.

“It’s over,” he reassures them, but he’s not sure his weak voice conveys that well.  “We need to keep moving. Chop chop.”

“Are you sure?” Ruby asks in such a small voice that Qrow’s not even sure she actually asked the question.

“Yup,” is all he can say as the pain washes over his body in waves.

 

By the end of the day, the scratch has become infected and fever sets in.

 

The kids try, they really do.  But Qrow has medical experience born from years of being a Huntsman, and they only have what little they’d learned before the Fall of Beacon.  If one of the kids had gotten stung, maybe Qrow could reduced the amount of hell created by the poison, but they can’t really help if the situation happens to be reversed.  Which, of course, it is. 

Qrow fights to remain sitting up when they stop moving.  It makes his chest hurt less, the coughing less severe. He doesn’t want them to notice the bloody spittle that dots the skin of his hand and arm after he hacks and gasps.

The convulsions come and go, driving him to exhaustion.  And the fever doesn’t make anything easier. His head feels fuzzy and his whole body both burns and freezes in such a way that no adjustment can make him comfortable.  

And yet, they walk on.

 

Qrow can’t remember them splitting up, but he soon notices Ren and Nora’s absence.  According to Ruby, they’d gone up a mountain to scout and see if they could find a spot of civilization that might be able to help him.

Instead of help, there comes a fight, in which Jaune drags Qrow by his armpits to shelter behind a building. Qrow wants to cry out, but doesn’t have the energy or the will to let his selfish desires damn the children.  But despite everything, he can’t help but reach for Jaune as the kid turns back towards the fight, Crocea Mors already pulled from its scabbard.

Qrow wants to thank him, to tell him to take care of Ruby.  To pass on the message that they’d done all they could, and he was grateful for that.

Instead, Qrow has to listen as the sounds of fighting fade in and out as he struggles to remain conscious.  He has to just stay aware enough to know--he has to bear witness if something happens, had to hopefully live long enough to get word to their parents if their children don’t return home.

But he doesn’t last that long.

Qrow’s comatose dreams torment him. Figures grab and manhandle his body, shocking it and cutting him open.  He watches blood and pus and poison leak out of the giant hole in his abdomen. He hears horrible things, horrible sounds, but something cuts through his mental torture: the idea that he has to hold on.  The figures seem  _ determined _ to drag him down, to make him give in to something, but Qrow knows, somewhere deep inside him, that this isn’t an option.  Pain was only temporary, dreams are only dreams. If he makes it out alive, the kids will need him, and they needed him already, so he has to live.

He can’t take one more thing away from them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas and happy holidays, all!
> 
> Thank you so much.


End file.
